To Get Away From The Really Real World: Portraying advancing age has helped Unilever Group’s Dove soap. About 18 months ago, Dove market researchers suspected that advertisers were stuck in the old habit of presenting only youth and slimness as attractive. To confirm that idea, they pored over video clips of commercials and leafed through pages torn from magazines, pasting them up into photo collages. And indeed, the result was a shrine to the slim, the full-chested, and the young.
Then, because Dove is a global brand, the researchers trekked across the U.S., South America, Europe, and Asia to ask thousands of women of all ages what they thought of the portrayal of beauty in advertising. No matter the country, they repeatedly heard the gripe that “the images of beauty in ads are unrealistic and unattainable,” says Dove marketing director Philippe Harousseau.
Capitalizing on that sentiment, Dove turned industry tradition on its head last October with print ads using ordinary looking women instead of glamorous models. Two of the six shots in the ad exult in advancing age. One shows a 46-year-old woman with deep lines around her jaw and eyes and a full mane of gray hair. The caption: “Why aren’t women glad to be gray?”
The payoff so far: In the nine months following the launch of the campaign, sales of Dove rose 3.4% from a year ago. That uptick sounds small, but it’s huge for the static soap category, and it exceeds the growth in soap sales as a whole, according to Information Resources Inc., which doesn’t include sales at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT - News) in its data. Why is the campaign working? “As you get older, fantasy and idealization are out, and reality and authenticity are in,” says James J. Gilmartin, president of ad agency Coming of Age Inc. in Lombard, Ill.